“Emerging Scholars in Jain Studies” virtual series: Identity and Identities, Jain and Otherwise

 

What does "identity" mean? The term may seem to be as equivocal as it is over-burdened in contemporary philosophy and politics. On the one hand, there is the bedrock singularity that makes anything something at all; and on the other, a person is said to have various identities in affiliation with various social groups. Putting modern theorists of identity in conversation with the eighth-century Śvetāmbara philosopher Haribhadrasūri and his characteristically Jain doctrine of non-one-sidedness (anekāntavāda), this lecture will show how these apparently disparate meanings of “identity” can be seen to hang together in Jain thought and praxis. To identify oneself with the Jain ideology of liberation — to have a certain sort of Jain social identity — involves identifying oneself in terms of a particular non-one-sided ontology of persistence and change.

Presented by the Departments of Religious Studies at UC Davis and UC Riverside

 

Anil Mundra is the inaugural Bhagvan Vimalnath Assistant Professor of Jain Studies and South Asian Religions in the Department of Religious Studies of the University of California, Santa Barbara, having recently completed an Alka Siddhartha Dalal Postdoctoral Fellowship for the study of Jainism at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. His research focuses on how premodern Jain philosophers negotiate religious identity, diversity, and disagreement.